Too Much Reality

"Too much reality is not what the people want."

-Woody Allen, Stardust Memories

So I was just thinking about the conversation that spun out of Alex's review of "Sunshine," in which Andrew referred to Danny Boyle as "the anti-genre guy." I think I get what you mean, and I guess I have mixed feelings about it. ("Unbreakable" springs to mind as a movie trying something similar and failing kinda dramatically.)

In fact, talking about superhero comics, there's a similar divide in thinking there, as well. Without going into too much geeky detail, there's a school of thought that adheres to silver-age images like the Flash standing with his hands pressed against the sides of his head and screaming "Everything around me is green...green...GREEN!" On the other hand, there's comics that feature the Joker firing a bullet into Barbara Gordon's spine, stripping her naked, and taking photographs of her mutilated body for her father. That argument's even there (albeit in a subtler way) in the movies -- contrasting the first X-Men movie as a grittier sci-fi thriller with the first Spider-Man as a big, colorful, over-the-top fantasy.

But it's a trend towards -- I don't really know what to call it, exactly. But it's widespread, in the grim-'n-gritty approach to comics, in the tsunami of reality television. Video games seem to be reaching towards more and more elaborately simulated environments, particularly in the rise of massively-multiplayer online gaming. Animation has shifted away from gorgeous, stylized, hand-painted artwork, to this hideous, stiff, jagged CGI. I sometimes think that I'm the last fantasy writer left in theatre. And the internet -- with the rise of myspace, youtube, and, er, opinionated blogs -- I know of at least one person who referred to Time Magazine's designation of "You" as the person of the year as "Lamer than anything that has previously been called lame", and I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I think that they're onto something.

I dunno. I don't really have any big realization or anything about it to offer, but I do wonder what it all means.